Peking, 5th September 1865.
I returned on Saturday from my trip to the Great Wall; I must try and give you some account of it.
We started on the 25th August, as I told you before. Saurin and Frater, one of the student interpreters, were going to make a journey in Mongolia, and Murray and I accompanied them to the frontier.
Each party had three servants—a man to look after clothes, bedding, and things in general, a cook, and a groom; but besides these our people took with them their servant, a queer little oddity of a Chinaman, very dirty, in an old English sailor’s pea-jacket, much too big for him, which earned him the name of the “Skipper.” I never saw such a merry, willing little creature; he was always at work and always laughing, as if everything he did were a capital joke, and the very fact of his being in the world at all something so ridiculous that he really couldn’t get over it.
I need tell you little of our first day’s journey, as far as regards scenery. I had never seen that part of the plain which lies north-east of Peking, but it is exactly like the rest, which I have often described to you. We breakfasted at a place called Sun-Ho, about thirteen miles hence; soon after that the country became prettier. We passed some cosy villages with fine old willows; from these one is called Ku-Lin-Shu, the “Old Willow Trees,” and here we stopped to rest during the great heat of the day at the tea-shop. As usual, all the people were very civil and talkative. One elderly man, whose name was Ma, a Mohammedan, and evidently the village politician, was very communicative; he was a great Tory, and laudator temporis acti, abusing the present dynasty, and sighing over the “good old days” of the Mings. I gave him a cigar, which he took with great delight, and jumped up on to a little low wall, where he sat perched with his hams on his heels like an old bird, and went on with his denunciation of the Tartars. “Ugh!” said he, “they have not got a good officer among all their mandarins. They brought us into the war with foreign powers, and then when they saw the big men and the big horses, and heard the poum-poum-poum of the cannon, what did they do? Why, they ran away and left us to pay for it all.”
We slept at a place called Niu-Lan-Shan, near which there are some marshes with herons and wild-fowl. A Chinese inn is very unlike our notions of an inn. It is generally built round the four sides of a courtyard; the guests’ house is at the bottom, facing north and south. East and west are stalls for mules, horses, and donkeys; the remaining side is occupied by the people of the house. The inn-yard is very animated—carts, pigs, horses, mules, dogs, flocks of pigeons, and poultry are crowded into it, besides poor travellers, Chinese and Mongol. Then there are generally a travelling barber plying his trade in one corner, a pedlar haggling for a few cash in another, and all the idle vagabonds who seem to comprise the greater part of the population of every place in Northern China, and who come in to loaf about and make remarks about the foreigners. There is no great variety or originality in these. There is always a fugleman, who makes a remark, and then the crowd take it up in chorus. The following is really a fair specimen of the sort of thing they say about us:—
Fugleman—“Those boots! They are made of scented cow’s leather” (Russia leather).
Chorus—“Those boots! They are made of scented cow’s leather.”
Fugleman—“Those boots! He that wears them need not fear water.”
Chorus (admiringly)—“Those boots! He that wears them,” etc.